SOURCE: Vance, Eugene. “Formulaic Language and Heroic Warfare.” In Reading the “Song of Roland,” pp. 21-38. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970.

[In the following excerpt, Vance explains how the author of The Song of Roland uses traditional verbal formulas while managing to convey contradictions and abstractions in the poem.]

The manuscript of the Oxford version of the Song of Roland was produced by an Anglo-Norman scribe sometime during the third quarter of the twelfth century. Its language is basically the dialect spoken in England a century after the Norman conquest (1066);¹ but the actual poem on which the Oxford manuscript is based predates this manuscript by at least a half century, and we cannot be certain whether the poet lived in England or on the continent.

A reader who has even a scant knowledge of French will recognize after brief exposure to the Song of Roland that its poetic idiom relies on movable clusters of words, which we arbitrarily call “formulas.” All language, even the most neutral prose, is to some extent formulaic; but in an oral tradition from which poems like the Iliad and the Song of Roland emerge, the use of formulaic language is a highly developed technique of composition. During the last few decades scholars have paid much attention to bards of rural Yugoslavia who still perpetuate an ancient narrative tradition and who are capable of reciting long epics from memory; as a result, we know that oral technique poses special problems for the literary critic.

Though there are many metrical irregularities in the Oxford manuscript, the standard line in the Song of Roland is assonanced and has ten syllables with a caesura after the fourth syllable. Any regular line in the poem will therefore call for the following components: one verbal unit of four syllables, another of six syllables, and a terminal vowel sound which fulfills the assonance of the laisse. …

Because an oral poet tended to improvise during the recitation of his poem, he would draw on a stockpile of memorized formulas to satisfy the demands of meter and assonance that characterised his narrative form. Doubtless, the melodic accompaniment to his narrative was also composed of formulas and variations. It is not easy to define a “formula” in oral poetry. An oral formula has frequently been described by students of the epic as “a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given, essential idea.”² However, the Song of Roland is full of formulas that may be inflected to suit all kinds of metrical conditions and may be contracted to a single hemistiche or expanded to occupy an entire laisse. Formulas tend to unite identifiable clusters of words which convey a particular idea, but the basis of a formula is not exclusively verbal. I am convinced that a formula may also exist in the memory as a nonverbal Gestalt before it is clothed in words that satisfy the metrical demands of the Old French decasyllabic verse. Whatever cognitive process underlies formulaic technique, this technique allowed a jongleur to compose without weighing his diction and to embellish his traditional themes by exploiting a “ragbag” of well-tried expressions that were the basic implements of his trade and the common property of all.

The tradition of epic poetry in northern France served the interests of a de facto aristocracy, which first began to establish itself by courage and military power following the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire. By the year a.d. 1000, political power had become so dispersed that the State for all practical purposes no longer existed, and the only real political unit was the fortified castle of a small lord who could offer protection to a certain number of local dependents attached to his domain.³ In this emerging military caste, the knight remained the nobleman par excellence, and the language of oral epic poetry which evolved during this period of French history favored the military values of that ruling caste. Consequently, the poetic language of the Old French epic was better able to deal literally with the action of warfare than with any other sector of human experience. Hence, when the poet of the Song of Roland describes the war between Christians and pagans, he unfolds a dowry of traditional formulas which represent in codified form the heroic ideals of a ruling chivalric class. If the Song of Roland is socially exclusive—the lower orders of society have no place in the poem—the poem's formulaic language is also exclusive and posits what amounts to a utopia of chivalric values, an idealized and simplified world where the nobility could find delivery from the torpor of everyday life and fulfill their most ardent dreams.

Because warfare was the primary activity of the early feudal nobility, it is no surprise that scenes depicting the key moments of combat rely more heavily upon traditional formulas than passages dealing with less typical areas of feudal life.⁴ Even though some readers may not be able to read the passages below with ease, they will recognize, through the recurrence of certain patterns of word and idea, that the poet operates within a well-defined system of formulas. The Old French epic formula is not like the Old English “kenning” (which occurs, for instance, when the poet of Beowulf calls the sea a “whale-road”) or those Homeric formulas that have a decorative allure (“the wine-dark sea”). On the contrary, it usually contains a “unit” of action, a single gesture, which combines with other formulas to generate a descriptive whole. As examples I have chosen several episodes in which a Christian slays a Saracen with his sword. Though the descriptions are enriched with variations, the poet is obviously following a single basic procedure as he presents that moment when a Christian's sword splits a pagan down the middle. I have purposely made my translations here as literal as possible, at the expense of meter, logic, and even syntax:

Trait Durendal, sa bone espee, nue,
Sun cheval brochet, si vait ferir Chernuble.
L'elme li freint u li carbuncle luisent,
Trenchent le cors [?] e la cheveleüre,
Si li trenchat les oilz e la faiture,
Le blanc osberc, dunt la maile est menue,
E tut le cors tresqu'en la furcheüre.
Enz en la sele, ki est a or batue,
El cheval est l'espee aresteüe;
Trenchet l'eschine, hunc n'i out quis jointure.
Tut abat mort el pred sur l'erbe drue.

(CIV)

He draws Durendal, his good sword, bare;
He spurs his horse, and goes to strike Chernuble.
He smashes his helmet where the carbuncles shine,
He splits the body and the hair on his head,
He splits the eyes and the face,
The white mail, whose chain is fine,
And the whole body right down to the crotch.
Into the saddle, which is of beaten gold,
Into the horse the sword went and stopped;
It splits the spine without seeking the joint,
And slaughters him dead on the field of thick grass.

In a less expansive version, where Oliver strikes the pagan Justin de Val Ferree, we still see the same motifs:

Danz Oliver trait ad sa bone espee
Que ses cumpainz Rollant li ad tant demandee,
E li il ad cum chevaler mustree.
Fiert un paien, Justin de Val Ferree.
Tute la teste li ad par mi sevree,
Trenchet le cors et la bronie safree,
La bone sele, ki a or est gemmee,
E al ceval a l'eschine trenchee:
Tut abat mort devant loi en la pree.

(CVII)

Lord Oliver has drawn his good sword
As his companion Roland has so long asked,
And he shows it off as befits a knight.
He strikes a pagan, Justin de Val Ferree.
He severed the whole head down the middle,
He splits the body and the saffron mail,
The good saddle, which is in gemmed gold,
And splits the horse through the spine:
He slaughters him dead before him in the field.

Here again is how Roland slays Grandonie:

Li quens le fiert tant vertuusement
Tresqu'al nasel tut le elme li fent,
Trenchet le nés e la buche e les denz,
Trestut le cors e l'osberc jazerenc,
De l'oree sele lé dous alves d'argent
E al ceval le dos parfundement;
Ambure ocist seinz nul recoevrement
E cil d'Espaigne s'en cleiment tuit dolent.

(CXXIV)

The count strikes him with such power
On the noseguard that he cracks the whole helmet.
He splits the nose and the mouth and the teeth,
Through the whole body and the linked mail,
And the pummel and the silver cantle
And deeply into the horse's back;
He kills them both beyond all reprieve,
And those from Spain cry out in anguish.

Such is the manner in which the epic hero, be it Roland, Oliver, or any other, slaughters a Saracen in single-handed combat. The force and precision with which a knight splits a pagan in two (and his horse) are the basis for honor and esteem in this chivalric world. As Roland cries out to Oliver during battle,

                                                            “Now I know you, brother!
If the emperor loves us, it's for such blows!”
From every side the cry “Munjoie!” resounds.

(CVII)

The reader will notice that all the distinct phases of chivalric combat entail their characteristic formulas—the taking up of arms, the mobilization of the army, the assault against the masses by a single-handed hero, the moment of the lance's impact—and that these formulas comprise the raw material from which countless scenes and episodes will be built. These formulas enter the poem with a built-in ethical value, and we may say of our poet's language what one critic has said of Homer's: “The formulaic character of Homer's language means that everything in the world is regularly presented as all men (all men within the poem, that is) commonly perceive it. The style of Homer emphasizes constantly the accepted attitude toward each thing in the world, and this makes for a great unity of experience.”⁵ This “unity of experience,” which is a function of the conventionality in the poem's language, would seem to create difficulties for a poet who wishes to isolate what is particular about a given individual; yet he may overcome this dilemma by making quantitative, rather than qualitative, distinctions between his characters' actions. Fatally wounded, for example, Archbishop Turpin delivers more than a thousand blows (CLIV); Roland puts a whole army to rout (CLX). In other words, the poet of the Song of Roland distinguishes his heroes by magnifying them, just as a romanesque sculptor (such as the master of Vézelay) will make his Christ twice as big as the lesser spiritual heroes around him. Physical dimensions and God-given force are measures of spiritual virtue in twelfth-century art.

As the story of Roland passed beyond the tenth century, certain tensions inevitably developed in a heroic ideal that was becoming increasingly archaic. Europe began to rebuild new feudal nations among the ruins of the Carolingian Empire, and society demanded more from its leaders than brute, heroic courage. During this period of regroupment, the Song of Roland does not seem to have lost popularity but did gain complexity. We do not know exactly when the story of Roland was combined with the story of Charlemagne to form a single chanson de geste, but the effect of introducing a second major hero was to introduce a counterpoint of perspectives into the poem. Roland has the blind, unreflective courage of youth, but Charlemagne has the wisdom (two centuries' worth) of a man whose honor is beyond question and who has come to value human beings more than heroes. The first half of the Song of Roland is Roland's, so Charlemagne's fatigue with the heroic world does not yet dominate the narrative. Nevertheless, the poet introduces some telling contradictions into his formulaic narrative which belie the oversimplification inherent in his material and suggest that for all its glory, the heroic world is out of joint.

For example, let us consider several passages that deal with the formation of an army of knights and with their preparations to attack the enemy. The first such passage occurs when the pagans prepare to ambush the rearguard of Charlemagne's army as it passes through the mountains:

Paien s'adubent des osbercs sarazineis,
Tuit li plusur en sunt dublez en tries.
Lacent lor elmes mult bons, sarraguzeis,
Ceignent espees de l'acer vianeis;
Escuz unt genz, espiez valentineis,
E gunfanuns blancs e blois e vermeilz.
Laissent les muls e tuz les palefreiz,
Es destrers muntent, si chevalchent estreiz,
Clers fut li jurz e bels fut li soleilz:
N'unt guarnement que fut ne reflambeit.
Sunent mil grailles por ço que plus bel seit:
Granz est la noise, si l'oïrent Franceis.

(LXXIX)

The pagans arm themselves with Saracen mail,
Almost all their hauberks are triply lined.
They lace their helmets, Saragossa's best.
They gird up their swords of Viennese steel.
They bear fine shields and Valencian lances,
And banners of white and blue and crimson.
They leave their palfreys and their mules behind,
And they ride their battle-horses in close ranks.
Clear was the day, and beautiful the sun:
No piece of armor did not flame in the light.
Great is the noise: a thousand trumpets sound
Embellishments, and all the Frenchmen hear.

In this passage we get the full chivalric treatment: the splendor of arms, the hordes of soldiers, the glint of weaponry in the sun, and the noise. This is a topos common to all epics from Homer to Milton, and a reality of the warrior's world even today. The poet reveals his exultation in lines such as, “They sound a thousand trumpets to make it more beautiful.” The jubilant tone of the passage is mirrored in Roland's ecstasy at the prospect of battle: “Ah, may God grant it to us!” (LXXIX). Roland thus provides the traditional hero's response to the opportunity for testing his valor, and he even understands that such occasions for glory will provide excellent material for a future Song of Roland: “Let everyone deal out mighty blows, lest bad songs be sung of us!” (LXXIX). We have in effect been shown the epic world through the central hero's eyes.

Soon, however, Oliver acts out of prudence and climbs a hill to assess the pagan forces. Through Oliver's eyes we witness the same formulaic scene all over again, and the same splendors attract emphasis as before—the noise, banners, flaming weapons—but now they are held in the parenthesis, so to speak, of Oliver's less heroic anxiety:

Oliver es desur un pui muntet.
Or veit il ben d'Espaigne le regnet
E Sarrazins, ki tant sunt asemblez.
Luisent cil elme, ki ad or sunt gemmez,
E cil escuz e cil osbercs safrez
E cil espiez, cil gunfanum fermez.
Sul les escheles ne poet il acunter:
Tant en i ad que mesure n'en set;
E lui meïsme en est mult esguaret.
Cum il einz pout, del pui est avalet,
Vint as Franceis, tut lur ad acuntet.

(LXXXI)

Oliver climbs to the top of a hill.
Now he clearly sees the kingdom of Spain,
And Saracens assembled all in a mass.
Their helmets shine with gold and studded gems,
And all those shields and saffron-colored mail,
And all those swords, and the banners unfurled,
So many ranks there are, he cannot count.
He cannot estimate the number of troops.
Oliver himself is much disturbed.
Down from the hill he runs as fast as he can,
And returns to the Frenchmen to tell them all.

Oliver does not tremble with joy at the prospect of battle but runs down the hill as fast as he can—cum il einz pout—and tells the Frenchmen all. His behavior is at odds with the heroic timbre of the formulaic description we have just witnessed. As loyal and highly principled as his friend, Oliver is more flexible and brings into the poem an ingredient of pragmatism contrary to the norm of blind heroism that allows Roland not to “see” the pagan army. Oliver is the only person in the Song of Roland who sees fit to penetrate beneath the surface of events and to articulate what everyone in his heart already knows—that Ganelon has betrayed the rearguard—and, most important, to propose a course of action that could ward off the disaster.

Once the French are irrevocably committed to mortal combat, however, Roland can permit himself to recognize the truth he earlier had denied. He surveys the on-coming army, and his heroic gladness modulates to solemn self-dedication to a glorious death in combat. Once again, we face the components of the life of chivalric glory, but this time they are seen in the perspective of Roland's own foreknowledge of certain disaster: “Very great will be the emperor's revenge” has the accent of both heroic exultation and acknowledged doom:

Marsile vient par mi une valee
Od sa grant ost que il out asemblee.
.XX. escheles ad li reis anumbrees.
Luisent cil elme as perres d'or gemmees;
E cil escuz e cez bronies sasfrees;
.VII. milie graisles i sunent la menee:
Grant est la noise par tute la contree.
Ço dist Rollant: “Oliver, compaign, frere,
Guenes li fels ad nostre mort juree.
La traïsun ne poet estre cellee;
Mult grant venjance en prendrat l'emperere.
Bataille avrum e forte e aduree,
Unches mais hom tel ne vit ajustee.”

(CXII)

Marsile comes up the middle of the valley
With his great army that he has assembled.
The king has gathered twenty corps of battle.
Their helmets shine with gold and studded gems,
And so too the shields, and the saffron mail.
Seven thousand trumpets sound the charge,
Great noise resounds throughout the countryside.
Says Roland: “Oliver, friend and brother,
The traitor Ganelon has sworn our death.
His treason can no longer be concealed.
Very great will be the emperor's revenge.
A long, hard battle is now close at hand.”

(CXII)

A final description of an army mustering for attack in the first half of the poem involves Charlemagne and the forward guard. Roland has just sounded his horn, and now Charlemagne and his men understand that their direst misgivings have materialized. They rally quickly to Roland's alarm but already grieve at the fate they know is in store for him. Here if anywhere one might have expected the poet to modulate his description to accord with the tragic circumstances. But not at all—still we see the sun shining on flaming armor, shields painted with flowers, lances, and golden banners:

Esclargiz est li vespres e li jurz.
Cuntre le soleil reluisent cil adub,
Osbercs e helmes i getent grant flabur,
E cil escuz, ki ben sunt peinz a flurs,
E cil espiez, cil oret gunfanun.

(CXXXVII)

The day advances into evening.
The weapons glisten in the light of the sun,
Hauberks and helmets cast up great flames,
So too the shields with flowers finely painted;
So too the swords and the golden banners.

Then, suddenly the tonality of the whole scene is reversed when we see its effect on the emperor. Instead of feeling heroic exaltation at the prospect of battle, Charlemagne (our Roland grown old) experiences only vexation and grief:

Li empereres cevalchet par irur
E li Franceis dolenz a curoçus:
N'i ad celoi ki durement ne plurt,
E de Rollant sunt en grant poür.

(CXXXVII)

The emperor rides forward in great wrath,
And the Frenchmen, too, grieving in their anger;
Every single one was weeping hard,
And they all fear greatly for Roland's sake.

Clearly, though the poetic language of a less complicated heroic age would tend to dictate the substance of poetic descriptions, our poet succeeds in introducing an expressive counterpoint to the heroic “party line.” Indeed, as if to thwart or short-circuit even more the lyricism inherent in the formulaic taking up of arms, the poet evokes another landscape whose dark and sinister valleys and roiled-up waters (themselves perhaps formulaic) visually abuse what we have just seen, making it seem very literally “out of place”:

Halt sunt li pui e tenebrus e grant, AOI.
Li val parfunt e les ewes curant.
Sunent cil graisle e derere e devant
E tuit rachatent encuntre l'olifant.
Li empereres chevalchet ireement
E li Franceis curuçus e dolent. …

(CXXXVIII)

High are the mountains, shadowy and vast,
The valleys are deep and the waters swift.
The trumpets echo behind and ahead,
And all together answer the Oliphant.
The emperor is riding forth in wrath,
And the Frenchmen too, in anger and grief.

By allowing contradictions into his narrative, the poet has questioned his material without rejecting it. He has welcomed the inflexibility of certain traditional motifs and refracted these through a sequence of perspectives, the first of which is Roland's and the last Charlemagne's: Roland is foolish and proud, the emperor old and wise. The emperor has come to value men more than heroes. His tragedy, his isolation (symbolized by two hundred years of age), is that he can in no way—not even in language—change the heroic formulas of a society that has become alien to him.

Nevertheless, Roland is decidedly the hero of the first half of this epic, and the poet remains committed to the virtuosity of his own formulaic material. Our suspicions that the poet may see more widely than his hero must remain dormant as the first half of the poem draws to a climactic close. Feeling the approach of death after he has been mortally wounded in his solitary struggle with the pagan masses, Roland staggers to a hilltop, where he tries to break his sword Durendal. Durendal symbolizes all of Roland's past conquests; indeed, as we shall see later, it even personifies his indomitable, heroic selfhood. The sword will not break but springs back up toward the sky, and one last, brief time we see a weapon gleaming in the sun. Because the audience has been well indoctrinated in the formulaic trappings of the warrior's world, this single detail suffices now to evoke the Gestalt of a whole glorious ethic. Now, Roland's condition is that of a solitary dying man who looks back on a life of hardship and suffering for Christ and Charlemagne. His joy at seeing the flash of sunlight on steel reveals that he remains steadfast, even in the sting of death, to those ideals of chivalric heroism by which he has lived:

Roland strikes his sword on the onyx stone.
The steel grinds, but does not break or chip.
And when he sees that it will never break,
Roland laments to himself for his sword:
“Ah, Durendal! So fine and clear and bright!
How you shine and flame out in the sunlight!
Charles was in the valley of Maurienne
When, through his angel, God commanded him
To let you gird one of his ranking counts:
Thus, the noble emperor armed me with you.
I conquered both Anjou and Brittany,
And then I conquered both Poitou and Maine. … ”

(CVXXII)

One danger of the formulaic theory is that it can explain too much and make us blind to other equally important considerations about language in the poem. Certainly, if Charlemagne allows himself to be drawn into a tragic web of personalities beneath him, it is not only because the language of his world is committed to inflexible formulas of heroic art. Charlemagne's impassivity reflects deeper attitudes about the very nature of language as a social instrument. Like Homer's Iliad, the Song of Roland grows out of an epic tradition whose heroes characteristically live a life of action, not one of words. In the Song of Roland discourse itself is seen as a form of action. This is not true of the Odyssey, which is also a formulaic poem, whose hero talks himself through the world more than he fights in it. When one reads such scenes as Roland's defiance of Ganelon or Ganelon's stormy visit to Marsile's court, one is inevitably struck by the interpenetration of language and gesture: in the first scene, Ganelon leaps up and throws off his cape when Roland names him for the embassy; Roland laughs out his sarcasm; Ganelon drops Charlemagne's glove. In the second scene, Marsile trembles with rage at Ganelon's message and brandishes a spear at him; Ganelon draws his sword “the length of two fingers” from its sheath; Ganelon throws off his cape; Marsile lunges to attack him; Ganelon backs off to retreat; Ganelon and Marsile come to terms and later kiss each other on the face and chin. Discourse in the Song of Roland is not a sphere in its own right and does not stand apart from the fabric of violence as a verbal realm opposed to action. It is not impossible to find analogous situations in our day where the word has approximately the same relationship to the deed. For example, on the football field, discourse serves to communicate the strategy of a forthcoming play, to exert the player to “beat” (if not “kill”) his opponent, and to convey the concerted emotions of spectators who vicariously participate in the violence before their eyes. It would be unthinkable for two football captains to sit down and talk things out instead of “having” them out in a game.

For the poet of the Song of Roland, as for the poet of the Iliad, discourse remains deeply rooted in that physical world in which his figures move. Discourse begins and ends in action, for ontologically they are at the same level. Thus, the five council scenes in the poem do not replace or even redirect action, but are part of it. The heroic ethos of the Roland is remarkably close to that of the Iliad, and especially of Achilles, who says to crafty Odysseus:

“ … I detest as the doorways of Death, I detest that man
Who hides one thing in the depth of his heart and speaks forth another.
But I will speak to you the way it seems best to me. … ”(6)

If an exception to this attitude exists in the Song of Roland, we may find it in Ganelon, who is a master of words and a devil. Ganelon first talks the French barons into rejecting Roland's strategy for dealing with the Saracens; he skillfully deceives Blancandrin into believing that Roland alone is to blame for the war against the pagans; he artfully exposes his plan for treason while they travel to Marsile's court; he convinces Marsile to play along with his deceit; finally, when Roland blows his horn, Ganelon lies openly to his emperor: “There is no battle! You are old and white as a flower, and such words make you seem childish” (CXXXIV).

Even Oliver, whose role is one of restraint and discretion, believes that a knight must not give himself over to vain discourse: when language becomes divorced from what lies immediately at hand, one's duty is to lay it aside and take up the sword. Thus when Oliver perceives that Roland is resolved not to sound his horn and that the fighting has already begun, he formally renounces discourse (“I do not want to speak”) in favor of the cry “Munjoie!”—this is the cry of action par excellence: “Whoever heard them cry ‘Munjoie!’ would never forget such noble vassalage” (XCII).

Ganelon, then, is the only figure in the Song of Roland in whom the slightest discrepancy between word and deed, between appearance and reality, is ever present. Adam Parry says of the Iliad:

Since the economy of the formulaic style confines speech to accepted patterns which all men assume to be true, there need never be a fundamental distinction between speech and reality; and between thought and reality—for thought and speech are not distinguished; or between appearance and reality—for the language of society is the way society makes things seem.⁷

We should not be surprised that Ganelon, who has betrayed the norms of his society, should use language differently from other men in the poem. We must remember that ideally, the cement of feudal society was an oath of faith between man and man, and when language became detached from a commitment of faith—faith of any kind—it became a tool of subversion. Achilles and Charlemagne are the most powerful men in the world, yet Achilles cannot bring himself to leave the Achaeans who have cheated him and sail away to a new world; it does not occur to Charlemagne to lift a finger against the tragedy that weaves itself about him. In both cases, there is a failure of language as a tool to analyze the world and to proffer an alternative to the horror of a present reality. Like Achilles, Charlemagne is cognitively circumscribed by the unreflective quality of his language—and this is the language of the poem—and is helplessly caught in an earthly community that is destined to destroy its better self. As if the poet wished to insist upon the deadly potency of the spoken word, he causes Ganelon's lie to Charlemagne (that the Saracen troops have been swallowed up by the sea) to become a terrifying prophecy of truth: Charlemagne will indeed drive the pagans en masse into the river Ebro (CLXXX). Let this be a lesson to medieval liars!

The close alliance between word and deed in the Song of Roland imparts great strength and virility to its poetry. … [M]ost of the formulas in the Song of Roland fulfill not only the exigencies of the ear (and the meter) but also the exigencies of the eye as the poet draws us into a world of things and movement. Word counts run the risk of being as subjective as value judgments; nevertheless one senses that the whole density and kinesis of the narrative in the Song of Roland derives, more than in most poetry, from an especially heavy reliance on substantives and verbs. The formulas, too, it must be remembered, have no absolute metrical length, but can be shortened, extended, or broken up and scattered through a whole line or two. A formula is as much a unit of space, mass, or action as it is a metrical unit of sound. The following two highly formulaic laisses will illustrate that concreteness that provides the fullest basis for knowledge in the heroic mentality, and even for communication as well:

Count Roland rides onto the battlefield,
With Durendal, which hacks and slices well.
He spreads great harm among the Saracens.
What a sight: man after man he kills;
Bright blood is everywhere upon the ground!
His hauberk and his arms are red with blood,
His horse, too, about the neck and shoulders.
Oliver, as well, is no less quick to strike,
And the twelve peers, who all fight blamelessly.
The Frenchmen strike, then multiply their blows.
Some of the pagans die, while others faint.
The archbishop says, “Blessed be our barons!”
“Munjoie!” he cries, which is the call of Charles.

(CV)

Oliver now rides right into the mob.
His spear is broken, only a piece remains.
He goes to strike a pagan named Malun.
He breaks his shield, ornate with gold and flowers.
He knocks both of his eyes out of his head.
His brain spills and runs down to his feet.
Down he falls, with seven hundred dead men.
He kills then Turgis, and then Esturguz.
His spear breaks and splinters at the handle.
Thus speaks Roland: “Friend, what are you doing?
What good is a club in such a battle?
Steel and Iron are what should be used here.
Where is your sword, which is called ‘Halteclere’!?
The handguard is gold, the pummel crystal.”
“I could not draw it! too much work to do!”

(CVI)

Admirably suited to experience that is concrete, language in the Song of Roland is correspondingly weak when dealing with abstractions, generalities, and the area of subjectivity. The poet always evaluates his characters in terms of a specific role rather than in the light of any final, abstract ethical generality. One is not usually “good” in the Song of Roland—one is a “good vassal” or a “good baron”; or else one strikes “good blows” or carries a “good sword.” In such cases the word “good” does not derive its meaning from any ultimate notion of good and evil, but rather from some immediate, physical attribute.⁸ Often men will be described adjectively as vassal, baron, which means that they are good, or as serf, which means that they are evil. In other words, ethical judgments are made on the basis of extrinsic situations, not of intrinsic qualities. Even Charlemagne, the emperor, is vassal. As Roland says, “The French are good: they will strike like vassals.” In this poem it is impossible to know a man apart from his acts.

Occasionally, however, we see the poet groping for abstractions. The word bontet (goodness) appears twice in the poem, once in the words of Ganelon as he praises his emperor's “goodness” before Marsile (XL), and once again in the poet's description of the “goodness” of Charlemagne's sword, Joyeuse (CLXXXIII). In the first case, however, the context suggests that bontet means prowess or valor of a physical kind; in the second, the bontet of Charlemagne's sword derives from a relic of Christ's passion mounted in the handle. When the poet tries to tell us that Roland never liked any evil man, he falls back on a curious redundancy: ne malvais hume de male part (CLIX) is confusing until we understand that the poet instinctively reinforces his abstract ethical judgment (a “bad man”) by rooting it in a more concrete spatial axis (“from a bad part”). To shift the accent of Horace's phrase, we may say that from the beginning to the end of the Song of Roland we are constantly not “in the midst of things” but “in the midst of things.”

Even though the poet shows signs of unrest within the traditional framework of ethical values he has inherited, he nevertheless remains in it; hence, a lord is good; a vassal is good; a serf is bad. However, beyond the feudal hierarchy of values in the poem is a larger and self-evident moral distinction: Christians are good and Saracens are evil. The Saracens are feudal like the Christians, yet the poet and his audience are so ideologically sure of themselves that the former can lavish feudal terms of praise on the Saracens to magnify their evil and not be misunderstood.

Thus, the poet can say of Blancandrin, Ganelon's pagan colleague in conspiracy, “In vassalage he was very much a knight; he showed courage in helping his lord” (III). These formulas of excellence are the means by which the Saracens' capacity for evil is exaggerated. In the same way, Milton can describe Satan sitting “exalted” on his throne in Hell, “by merit raised / to that bad eminence … ” (Paradise Lost, II.5). Or, again, the medieval poet praises the thieving pagan who attempts to steal Roland's sword as he is dying. The poet tells us that the Arab has soiled his body by smearing it with blood and that he has passed himself off as a dead man on the battlefield—this is a grotesque, but common, ploy of cowardice. Then he adds, “he was beautiful and strong and of great vassalage” (CLIX). Such an obvious contradiction may be understood in the same way as is one's saying to us that his sprained ankle is “good and sore.” The Saracens are “good and bad.”

Ethically, the Song of Roland tends to deal with effects and not causes. More exactly, we should say that in this poem it is impossible to distinguish between them. In other words, the language of the Song of Roland is well equipped to represent the social and political side of the feudal world, but it does not test the spiritual motives behind them. One could apply to this poem a descriptive anthropological term, which has also been applied to the Iliad: the Song of Roland expresses a shame culture instead of a guilt culture. I say this because the fear of God, despite the Christian context of the poem, is not the strongest moral force its characters know; rather, it is respect for public opinion. The enjoyment of honour is more their goal than a quiet conscience.

One reason why the poet does not explore the spiritual dimension of his characters is that he lived in a culture that was linguistically compartmented and stratified, where the diverse functions of language (religious, judicial, communicative, artistic, etc.) were fulfilled in diverse and well-differentiated spheres of language and style.⁹ A stratification of styles and even of language-functions is not easily understood in a linguistic community such as our own, where there has been an unprecedented stylistic leveling and where everybody from the President to the policeman is taught to talk from the hip. The Song of Roland, however, originated in and was destined for an exclusive audience, one of extraordinary ethical solidarity, whose members automatically understood the moral system operating in the language and idiom of the poem. One critic has suggested that this explains why the poem is so paratactic, that is, why it can set forth its propositions without those conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositions that normally would link phrase to phrase in an intelligible sequence where causality is clear.¹⁰ The culture shared by the poet's audience could be counted on to provide intellectual continuity. My own feeling is that the vernacular French oral tradition was simply unconcerned with the subtleties of reasoned, reflective narrative such as we find in the cultural tradition of medieval Latin. The French is a vernacular language of action; by contrast, the language of the medieval Latin epic, its cultural bedfellow, tends to be didactic and intellectual. A Latin epic such as Eupolemius' Messiad has for its narrative substance, allegory; for its heroes, Biblical figures or personifications of virtues and vices; and for its action, sermonizing harangues.¹¹ The two kinds of poem play complementary roles in medieval culture, each stressing a different area of experience. The latter, destined to preoccupy the “busy leisure” (negotiosissimum otium) of the contemplative man in the cloister, who believed that there was no exterior path to the knowledge of God, asks its reader to look beyond the letter of the tale and to contemplate the eternal, spiritual truths it contains; the former is destined for men of active life who (without necessarily being less pious) accept passionate and physical daring as the best indication of moral worth.¹² The poet says of the duel between Baligant and Charlemagne: “This battle can never end, until one of them recognizes his wrong” (CCLIX). So too, Baligant learns of his moral error only when the tide of events turns against him:

Baligant sees that his banner is fallen
And then he sees Mohammed's flag is down:
The Emir now begins to understand
That he is wrong and Charlemagne is right.

(CCLVII)

In a poem where discourse is a form of action, action is likewise a form of discourse. By virtue of his gestes, Roland is in a sense the “author” of the Song of Roland. Like Achilles, he knows that if his actions are worthy, men will sing a “good” song and not a “bad” one about him. The poet, for his part, gives himself over anonymously to his narrative, for the excellence of the material guarantees that the song will be good. Yet if the poet effaces himself one minute to allow the poem to “write itself,” the next minute he comes alive as an oral performer and lives out the passions of his hero, making them his own. In the heat of the oral performance, Roland's excellence becomes the poet's; the hero becomes an artist, and the artist becomes a hero, transformed by his own song.

Notes

1. For a convenient linguistic survey of the poem, see Bédier's Commentaires, pp. 241-62.

2. Milman Parry, “Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making, I: Homer and Homeric Style,” in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 41, 1930, p. 80. This definition has been accepted without reserve by certain students of oral epic for two generations. As we shall see in the discussion that follows, formulas do not always appear under the same metrical conditions, but can be dilated to any length, depending upon the will of the poet. Parry's definition of an oral “formula” is very narrow.

3. Marc Bloch's Feudal Society, 2 vols., Chicago, 1956-57, is still the most authoritative history of this period.

4. See the meticulous study of formulaic battle narrative in the chanson de geste by Renate Hitze, Studien zu Sprache und Stil der Kampfschilderungen in den Chansons de Geste, Geneva and Paris, 1965.

5. Adam Parry, “The Language of Achilles,” in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 87, 1956, p. 3.

6. Richmond Lattimore, trans., Iliad, Chicago, 1951, Book IX, ll. pp. 312-14.

7. Parry, “Language of Achilles.”

8. George Fenwick Jones, The Ethos of the Song of Roland, Baltimore, Md., 1963, pp. 20-21.

9. See Paul Zumther's historico-linguistic study, Langue et techniques poétiques à l'époque romane, Paris, 1963, esp. pp. 38-55.

10. I refer to Erich Auerbach's well-known thesis in Mimesis, Chap. 5.

11. Eupolemius, The Messiad, ed. Manitius, Romanische Förschungen 6, 1891, pp. 509-56.

12. Latin, the language of Bible and the liturgy, was capable of its own kind of action—spiritual action as opposed to physical. Grammatica is the medium of salvation. In the words of one monastic grammarian who comments on the Rule of St. Benedict,

    This little book is full of holy gifts; it contains Scripture and it is seasoned with grammar. Scripture teaches us to seek after the kingdom of God, to detach the self from the earth, to rise above the self. It promises the blessed these heavenly boons: to live with the Lord, to dwell always with Him. Grammar, then, through the goodness of God, confers great benefits on those who read it with care

    (Smaragdus of St. Mihiel, as quoted by Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, New York, 1961, p. 52).